


This Is Not Our Fate

by firecat



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Affectionate Insults, Battle, Curses, Dead But Improving, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Love/Hate, Magical Artifacts, Prophecy, Sex Magic, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:34:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28909404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: Laura hoists Mad Sweeney’s dead body over her shoulders and strides off. What happens then?
Relationships: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	This Is Not Our Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss_M](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/gifts).



> Begins after the last episode of Season 2.

“We are the same. Shadow is not,” dead Laura tells dead Sweeney.

Sweeney’s deadness does not permit him to talk at this moment. Perhaps this is why Laura is speaking to him in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, and not a sneering or threatening one. Perhaps she even has a neutral expression on her face, instead of the one that makes him think she sees a giant cockroach when she looks at him. He can’t tell, because his face is banging against her back as she walks down the road with his dead body over her shoulder. And even if he could open his eyes, he suspects the kind of dead he is means he can’t see. 

He is frustrated mainly because he wants to ask her to explain herself, and he can’t. It just figures that Sweeney’s kind of dead leaves him able to experience frustration. 

“You and I, we are doers. We want things, and we use our power to go after them,” Laura tells Mad Sweeney. “Shadow? He’s not a doer. He’s a do-ee. He exists to be acted upon. He has power, but he doesn’t understand it. Know how to use it. Or care.”

A funny way to describe the guy who just killed Sweeney by running him through with a spear.

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” remarks Laura. “It’s like, now that we’re both dead, we’re more closely aligned or something. I can hear your thoughts. Think of how he killed you. He just held the spear and you ran into it. That’s the most passive way I can imagine someone killing someone.”

Sweeney supposes she is right. For one reason or another, he doesn’t particularly want to focus on the moment of his death right now.

“I never thought you looked like a giant cockroach, you know,” Laura continues. “More like the Cowardly Lion from _The Wizard of Oz._ But I have to admit you’re a lot more handsome.”

It is one of the few positive things she’s ever said to him, and for the life of him (or should that be the death of him?), Sweeney has no idea why the thought of Laura finding him handsome pleases him right now. Especially because he isn’t likely to stay handsome long, in this state.

Thinking of people who found him handsome sends his memory trawling back to Essie McGowan. The woman who’d brought him to this benighted country. She’d not seen him often — the version of him she believed in wasn’t supposed to be easy to see. But on that final night of her life, when he’d come to take her hand, he’d seen it in her eyes. The recognition. The longing. The resignation. 

Laura looks a bit like her, actually.

“There’s no Essie McGowan in my family tree,” says Laura abruptly. 

Sweeney somehow knows she is lying. A rather useless ability for a dead person to suddenly develop. If only he’d had it when he’d encountered Wednesday a few weeks ago and been guilted into doing the old deceiver a favor.

But he knows Laura has no idea who her ancestors were, or when they’d come to America.

As it happens, she isn’t closely related to Essie. He’d kept an eye on that family, when he’d had a moment to spare from drinking himself to stupefaction. But Laura’s ancestors did come from the Emerald Isle. It is as clear as if she’d been born with a pint of green beer in her hand. 

“Is that so?” Laura asks him, still speaking out loud although she has no need to. “I wouldn’t mind a look at my ancestors. Does this magic coin of yours do any time travel tricks?”

“If I knew it did, do you think I’d be hanging off your shoulder right now with a spear-shaped hole in my chest?” retorts Sweeney, without speaking.

“You know, for someone who’s carried this coin, no, this entire _hoard_ of coins, around for centuries, you certainly seem to have shown remarkable lack of interest in learning more about it. You didn’t realize it would bring me back to life, did you? Well, half-life. You never gave the slightest thought to why you couldn’t die, no matter how many bar brawls you got into. Did you?”

He has to admit she is right. He knew the coin brought him good luck. With good luck, he could have pretty much whatever his imagination desired, if it were compatible with the reality of the moment he found himself in. Why would he bother to find out whether it could do other things?

Has he always been that focused in the moment? Has he ever had dreams, goals? He can’t remember now. 

“So, you were always satisfied with the reality of the moment?” demands Laura. “Maybe you’re more like Shadow than I thought. Well, consider this death a wakeup call. I’m not satisfied with the reality of this moment. I want to be fully alive again, and plenty more besides. And I’m not going to let you Rest In Peace or in any other state until we get to the bottom of what this magical coin and the rest of it can do for us.”

Sweeney has no objections to this, at least in theory. He would rather be fully alive again as well. Or fully dead. But not this infuriating in-between state.

“Exactly,” says Laura.

* * *

* * *

“It’s called the Dew Drop Inn,” Laura tells him. “Isn’t that just fucking adorable? I think we’ll skip booking a room. The parking lot’s almost empty and the Vacancy sign is lit.” Sweeney hears a bang, and the sound of wood tearing. She’s just busted open the door of some random room.

“Not a random room. The one farthest from the office,” Laura corrects. 

Sweeney feels himself falling. Now he lies on his side on what he guesses is a bed. He is still folded in half.

“You just lie tight for a moment,” Laura orders. She snickers. “Tight.” He hears the rumble of a pocket door closing. The bathroom, he assumes. Why she’s bothering with closing the door, he has no idea. Then he’s treated to the sound of Laura puking her guts out. (Quite literally, he assumes.) 

Sweeney can’t move. Rigor mortis has set in. It _hurts._ It just isn’t fair that Sweeney should be dead and also in pain. Death is supposed to be a surcease of pain.

They really make quite a pair.

A toilet flushes. “Sucks to be you,” remarks Laura, and he hears her moving towards him. 

He feels her flop on the bed next to his folded-up corpse. He hears the flare of a match being lit and smells stale tobacco. “Now,” she says, around her inhale. “What about this coin?” 

“What about it?” Mad Sweeney says, into their telepathic connection. 

“What can it do other than bring good luck? And reconnect my consciousness to a decaying body?” 

“I have no idea, you daft cunt,” Mad Sweeney tells her, and if he were still capable of speech, he would be hissing it in anger. 

Calling her a cunt has the predictable effect. Laura slaps the side of his head. “Let’s find out.”

She rolls him onto his back. His feet are jutting over his head, reminding him of a yoga instructor he once bedded. Then Laura kisses him. It feels like there’s a great static shock to his brain, and then he suddenly sees—

* * *

* * *

_**—a powerful man, sitting on a throne in a great hall.**_ A crowd of people surrounds him. Mad Sweeney sees it through his own eyes (they have started working again?) but he recognizes the man on the throne. No, not a man. A king. A god-king, who ruled his people well for one hundred and fifty years. He used to be that god-king. That—

“Lugh, Lugh, Lugh,” the people chant.

He rises, his arms out to his side, to show off his armor, resplendent with gold and rich leather. He takes his great spear and raises it above his head. The crowd cheers more loudly.

“We are the Tuatha de Danaan,” he says in a voice pitched to reach the back of the hall, and beyond, all the way to the lands of their enemies.

When he resumes the throne, the crowd quiets.

Four men are dragged before him. They are in chains. Three are so brutally wounded, they look more like corpses than men. Nevertheless, they still cling to life.

The fourth is older, his head bowed not only because of the heavy chain around his neck, but because he faces the worst of all fates a mortal man can receive — the death of his line.

For Lugh holds his sons’ fate in his hands. And Lugh is not known as a merciful king.

“Tuireann,” says Lugh. “I declare the éraic complete. I am recompensed for the death of my father, Cian, at the hands of your sons.”

“Grant me a boon, then, Great King,” begged Tuireann. “Lend me the healing pigskin, that my sons might be saved.”

Lugh hesitated not a whit of an instant. “No, I’ll not,” he told Tuireann. “The honor of your line is preserved by your sons’ fulfilling the éraic. I would not have killed them myself, but their wounds came upon them from other hands. They showed my father no mercy, and I shall not lift a knuckle to save them. Now begone from my sight.”

* * *

* * *

“Oh, my. That was something,” says Laura, withdrawing her mouth from his. “And look! Your rigor has passed.” She flops his arm back and forth. Then she flicks her fingers in front of his eyes. He flinches. “And you can see again as well. Quite the powerful coin, it seems, combined with a little sex magic.” 

She licks her lips.

Sweeney tries to move other parts of his body, to no avail. Only his eyes move. A fly lands on the end of his nose, and he stares at it, maddened with irritation. Or just with being Sweeney. 

“I still can’t bloody move,” he thinks at Laura.

“Well, now. It’s early hours yet,” she says. “So that monstrous god-king was you? How the mighty have fallen.”

“Being reminded once was enough, you needn’t rub it in,” retorts Mad Sweeney. “And — monstrous? I thought I looked rather handsome back then.”

“Your body and face were certainly well-shaped,” Laura says. “But, my word. I wouldn’t want to marry into that line. Imagine raising children with a father who shows no mercy, who sits there watching men die when he has the means to save them — the very means they brought him.”

“Justice was different back then,” Sweeney tries to explain. “You couldn’t be too merciful, or others would think you weak. Take advantage of you.”

“Oh you poor god-kings,” says Laura snarkily. “Always with an excuse for your death-dealing. You sound like Wednesday now.”

It was a good thing Sweeney couldn’t move. He would have crushed her head in an instant.

“You would have _tried,”_ Laura drawls, bored.

She lights another cigarette.

“I wanna know more about what’s between you and Wednesday,” Laura continues. “Why do you go on about this debt you owe him? Do you think if I kiss you again, the coin will let me see that?” 

“I really don’t want you to see that,” thinks Sweeney. In a deeper part of his mind, he’s aware he’s also thinking that if it gets him another kiss, it might just be worth the humiliation. He hopes Laura can’t sense that part...

“Oh, you like dead wife’s kisses that much, dead Sweeney?”

She throws the cigarette on the floor. Swings one leg over him and straddles his stomach. Drops her mouth on his. And he drops into the middle of—

* * *

* * *

_**—chaos.**_

A battle. 

Deafening noise, the cries of horses and shouts of men, the ring of metal upon metal. 

And mud. Everywhere, mud.

“Die, old man!” shouts the mounted warrior, his armor resplendent with gold and rich leather. He flings his spear. 

The spear travels over the heads of hundreds of men. It flies as if it has wings. And it buries itself in the one eye of Balor, the Fomorian.

Later, in the war tent, his attendants proudly present him with the warrior-sorcerer’s head. Balor. His grandfather. 

Lugh holds the head by its flaming red hair and looks into the ruin of an eye. He hopes that the stories he’s heard of demons haunting patricides aren’t true. It’s not as if he wanted to kill the old devil, evil eye or no evil eye. But, it is war. It is fate. It was foretold he would do it. 

Balor should have made sure to drown all three of his grandsons when he had the chance. But one had survived. That’s how these things come to pass. Incompetence. 

Sweeney watches Lugh’s face suddenly recoil in horror. He remembers it well. 

_What sorcery is this?_

The face has changed.

It is the face of a man, not a Fomorian. Lugh is holding onto black, shaggy hair, not the glistening red hair of his grandfather, which also graces his own head. The face is as craggy as the fjords, and there’s a sardonic twist to the mouth, as if, even in death, the will that once animated the head is planning revenge upon the war leader responsible for his death.

In the shadow of one cheekbone, Lugh thinks he sees the shape of a raven. 

* * *

* * *

“Wednesday,” whispers Sweeney as Laura withdraws her tongue from his mouth. “That old one-eyed _cunt.”_

He can speak again. His body is mostly still limp, though. 

“He was your grandfather?” asks Laura, confused by what she saw.

“Gods, no! And yet...” Mad Sweeney’s mind works furiously. 

“He does seem to know a lot of gods. And demons and demigods and whatnot,” muses Laura. “Maybe Balor was his special buddy, and he got mad that you killed him.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to have made up the prophesy in the first place,” Sweeney says.

“Exactly,” agrees Laura. “I don’t believe in all that prophesy, fate, destiny stuff. I mean, look at you and me. If anything’s supposed to be fate and destiny, it’s death. That’s it, end of the line...but look at us. I’m holding it together and you’re even recovering from it. Your mouth was warmer the second time.”

“Yours wasn’t,” says Sweeney snarkily.

Laura slaps him, and he takes it as his due. 

“Ugh, I’m going out to get some fly paper,” says Laura, swatting at the insects buzzing around her decaying body. 

She slams the door behind her, but since it’s broken, it flaps open, then keeps banging as the wind pushes it. It drives Mad Sweeney even more mad, since he can’t get up to fix it. 

To distract himself, he tries to make sense of the visions he had. Are they memories, or was he actually back in the past? They were so vivid. He could smell the crowd in the great hall, taste the mud that was flung in his mouth...

Sweeney tries to work his tongue to get that muddy taste off of it...but he can’t.

Fuck! He’s backsliding. His body is going through the dying process all over again. He really doesn’t want to experience rigor mortis again...

The door bangs exceptionally loudly and he hears Laura swearing. She drags a chair over to wedge it shut. 

Sweeney moves his eyes frantically, trying to get her attention. 

Then she’s leaning over him, staring into his face with a scowl. 

“What’s got your knickers in a bunch? Not that you ever bother with underwear, I’m sure, you great former god-king souse.”

“My tongue stopped working again,” Sweeney thinks at her.

“Oh,” Laura says. “That won’t do. I have plans for it later. But I think I know what’s the matter.” She leans down and shoves her tongue in his mouth, licking its ashy flavor onto his.

He does indeed feel his tongue softening, growing mobile again, and then he feels like he’s falling—

* * *

* * *

_**—once again into mud, on his knees.**_ Naked. And all around him the sound of bells. And the gray monks. Those accursed Christian monks, with their tonsures and their robes and their attitude, like no one in the history of the world has known a god but them.

“I drive you forth from this land,” intones one of the monks. His one visible eye gleams malevolently at Sweeney, kneeling in the mud where he’s been thrown after foolishly attempting to drive away twenty monks at once. His other eye is hidden in the hood of his robe. His face is as craggy as the fjords.

“I curse you, Suibhne mac Colmáin, if that be your name, to wander, naked and mad, until you should forget all that you ever were. I curse you to be friendless, and alone, until you die impaled upon the spear that you yourself once wielded.”

As if some upstart monk has the power call down a curse upon me, the king Suibhne mac Colmáin, who descended from Lugh himself, he thought.

He rose to his feet and wandered away, leaving the monks behind. There was something he needed to do...now what was it?

 _“Sweeney,”_ came a voice from the trees. Urgent and familiar.

He looked around vaguely. 

“Wife?” he muttered.

“Not your wife, Suibhne. Dead wife,” the voice said. “Listen!”

He listened. All he could hear were distant bells. Too many fucking bells.

Something hit his head. Hard. He whirled in the direction of the attack.

A woman was standing there. She wore a strange, patterned robe. Her face looked familiar but he didn’t remember her name. 

She had a snarl on her face and she was aiming another stone at him.

Anger took him over, burning out the haziness of his brain, the way the sun burns away the fog creeping in from the sea. In three strides he had reached her. He snatched her wrist, twisting it until she dropped the stone.

“What do you mean by it, throwing stones at me?” he shouted at her. He expected her to quail. Everybody quailed when he shouted. Except the fucking Gray Monks. 

She wasn’t one of them, but she didn’t quail either. She simply glared into his eyes, and her expression was one of defiance, but also hope.

Then she twisted _his_ wrist, and flipped him onto his back on the ground. Before he could leap to his feet, she straddled him, pinning his hands to the loamy earth. 

She pointed to the sky, where the sun rode, its rays filtering into the trees, mottling the ground with so many dots of light. They reminded him of something...what was it?

“The sun’s treasure, Sweeney, you...you god-ass. The Hoard. Dammit, do not let the hooded one, Grímnir, the one-eyed, curse the knowledge from your mind. What do you know about it?”

Sweeney remembered. 

“You just have to hold it in your mind,” he told her, “and you can take whatever you want from it. The sun’s treasure...”

* * *

* * *

Sweeney’s awareness snaps back to the motel room. Laura’s broken the kiss. She’s straddling him, pulling her dress over her head. Her naked body is pale and cold, but whole.

He urgently wants her. She’s pulling at his belt buckle, opening the fly of his jeans, and his cock springs free. It’s hard, and not from rigor mortis, as Laura grasps it and guides it to the entrance to her body. 

“Sweeney. Take what you want.”

He raises his arms to pull her back down to his mouth, and at the same moment, thrusts into her.

The static fuzz doesn’t fill his brain this time. They’re just _elsewhen,_ both of them, still joined with his cock inside her. He flips her onto her back. Then he’s taking her, there on the forest floor, fucking her fiercely, as if he can spill all of his troubles into her and be rid of them that way. 

She gives as good as she gets. She’s so strong for such a wee thing. Her hips lift him as she meets his thrusts, trying to take him deeper into her.

“Choose,” she’s saying. “Take what you want.”

“Daft woman,” he snarls. “I’ve seen the prophesies. I’m going to owe Grimnir a battle. I can’t choose until it’s finished.”

She lunges and he’s the one on his back again. She’s riding him like a warhorse. “Prophesies are bullshit. You have the sun’s treasure. That means you can write your own rules. You’re doing it now. That’s how we got back here, into your past.”

She shudders and stills on top of him, rocking slowly against him. Bent over him, her hair draping his face, whispering harshly in his ear.

“Choose. Take a different path. You are more than a madman, a hill spirit, an overgrown leprechaun. You are more than Grimnir’s mercenary. He has no hold over you. He’s only tricked you into thinking he does. You are a god. _Choose otherwise.”_

She goes completely still on top of him, but he feels her throbbing around him. 

“I choose,” he rasps. “I choose, Laura Moon.”

He’s back in the motel room, his cock buried deeply in—

No, she’s not dead wife any more. She’s warm, and pink, and her cunt is pulsing around him.

—Laura Moon.

“Good,” she says, a drop of sweat dripping from her forehead onto his cheek. “Now make me come on that huge cock, you great ginger brute.”

So he does.

* * *

* * *

They leave a couple of coins to pay for the damage to the door, and set out again, both under their own power this time, walking side by side.

“Alright, Laura Moon, I chose,” Sweeney says, blowing tobacco smoke from his lungs. “I hope you don’t think this means we’re going to live happily ever after. I’m still me and you’re still you and we’re both raging assholes. I don’t put good odds on our lasting a week before trying to kill each other.”

Laura takes a swig from the bottle of Fireball Whiskey she’d insisted on buying on the way out of town. Execrable stuff. An Irish lass ought to be ashamed. He is going to have to teach her a thing or two about single malts.

She makes a scoffing sound. “Happily ever after?” she says. “Where would be the fun in that?” 

“Where are we going, do you think?” Sweeney asks. 

“To the next crossroads, and from there, we’ll flip a coin to choose our next direction.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sweeney says. “This continent’s got a lot of ground to cover, and I for one can’t wait to see it all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Summary of the story of Lugh and the sons of Tuireann: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cian#Death_and_revenge


End file.
